It was a day in 2010, after the sweet, chubby, 20-something kid from her village shot himself, after she talked to his mother, after she helped clean up his body the best she could, that Cynthia Erickson found herself behind the Catholic church in the village of Tanana, throwing up. Then she started to count.

How many suicides had there been in her 300-person Interior village and the Yukon River villages in the region? Stevens Village. Minto. Ruby. Galena. Six in her recent memory. One of them was her brother-in-law. He hung himself.

"I was traumatized," she said.

She couldn't listen to another conversation in the village store where she worked. "Did you hear what happened to so-and-so?" Casual talk about wrenching losses. They'd become numb. It was like they lived in a war zone. She had to do something, she said, to make it stop.

"I was like 'What the hell are we doing?' " she said. "I'm afraid for my babies."